Musings on science, the Bible, and fantastic literature (and sometimes basketball and other stuff).
God speaks to us through the Bible and the findings of science, and we should listen to both types of revelation.
The title is from Psalm 84:11.
The Wikipedia is usually a pretty good reference. I mostly use the World English Bible (WEB), because is public domain. I am grateful.

Sunday, February 15, 2015

Excerpts from Orthodoxy, by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 9

At any street corner we may meet a man who utters the frantic and
blasphemous statement that he may be wrong. Every day one comes across somebody who says that of course his view may not be the right one. Of
course his view must be the right one, or it is not his view. We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the
multiplication table. We are in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of their own. Scoffers of old
time were too proud to be convinced; but these are too humble to be convinced. The meek do inherit the earth; but the modern skeptics are too
meek even to claim their inheritance. It is exactly this intellectual helplessness which is our second problem. The last chapter has been
concerned only with a fact of observation: that what peril of morbidity there is for man comes rather from his reason than his imagination. It was
not meant to attack the authority of reason; rather it is the ultimate purpose to defend it. For it needs defence. The whole modern world is at
war with reason; and the tower already reels.
Religious authority has often, doubtless, been oppressive or unreasonable; just as every legal system (and especially our present one) has been
callous and full of a cruel apathy. It is rational to attack the police; nay, it is glorious. But the modern critics of religious authority are
like men who should attack the police without ever having heard of burglars. For there is a great and possible peril to the human mind: a
peril as practical as burglary. Against it religious authority was reared, rightly or wrongly, as a barrier. And against it something certainly must
be reared as a barrier, if our race is to avoid ruin. That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself. Just as one generation
could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some
degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought. It is idle to talk always of the
alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality
at all. If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, “Why should anything go right; even observation and
deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?” The young sceptic
says, “I have a right to think for myself.” But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, “I have no right to think for myself. I have no
right to think at all.”Orthodoxy, first published in 1908, by G. K. Chesterton, is in the public domain, and available from Project Gutenberg. The previous post in this series is here.Thanks for reading! Read Chesterton.